On the Hills of God

by Fawal, Ibrahim

  His father’s large wardrobe of expensive suits stared at him like witnesses to a tragedy. Which one should he pick? Which silk shirt, which tie? What the hell did it matter, he said to himself. He grabbed the first one of each he could put his hands on and went back to the dining room, where his father’s corpse was now laid on the table. Basim and Uncle Boulus were there, but no one else. Yasmin wanted to help, but the men would not let her.

  “Just bring us some hot water and a few bath towels,” Basim told her, “we’ll do the rest.”

  The three men went to work, although Basim was handicapped. Uncle Boulus, his face yellow, stripped his brother-in-law naked. It was the first time Yousif had ever seen his father’s genitals and he wished he had been spared the experience. It revolted him that his father’s privacy was being violated. The doctor had always been prim, proper, decorous. Now, this! “Oh God!” Yousif said, crying. The doctor’s chest and abdomen were covered with sticky blood and dirt.

  They heard a knock on the door. Before they could open it Fatima stepped in with a large aluminum bowl full of steaming water. A load of towels draped her shoulder. Instinctively, Yousif threw his father’s trousers over his genitals.

  “Let me clean him up for you,” she said, the sleeves of her ankle-length dress rolled up high on her white arms. The men looked at each other. But Fatima forced her way in and placed the water on the dining room table.

  “Yousif,” she said, “remove your father’s watch and ring.”

  “No, no, no,” Yousif protested, anger grabbing his throat. “I want them to go with him.”

  “What for?” Uncle Boulus agreed with Fatima. “You might as well wear them.”

  “I want him buried the way he always was: a dignified man,” Yousif said, standing aside, pulling his hair.

  “Things don’t give dignity,” Uncle Boulus reminded him, untying the black leather band.

  “Keep the wedding band on him, that’s all,” Basim said, trying to remove the doctor’s shoes with one hand.

  Uncle Boulus handed the watch and black sapphire ring to Yousif. The water in the large bowl soon turned murky, like homemade red wine with sediment.

  “Poor, poor Dr. Safi,” Fatima lamented, scrubbing around the “sucking wound” that looked like a ripe black fig that had been torn open. “Who’s going to make you Arabic coffee? Who’s going to prepare the nergileh for you?”

  Yousif moaned. “All that intelligence . . . all that nobility . . . food for worms,” he said.

  “Stop it now,” Uncle Boulus told him, putting his arms around his shoulder. “It’s not Christian.”

  “Food for worms,” Yousif repeated, crying.

  “Maybe you should go out. Fatima is doing all the work anyway.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Fatima helped the men carry the doctor’s groomed body to the living room. He looked natural, Yousif thought, except his hair line was crooked and his striped red tie askew. The body was laid in a makeshift coffin: a mattress and a pillow in the middle of the room, covered with a white bed sheet. It radiated with goodness—in death as in life.

  Time had been overturned. Night had become day. People came in droves. Each arrival sparked new misery. Amin and his parents, Jamal, even old man Abu Khalil, the bone fixer, were among those whose sleep had been disturbed. The house was soon filled with infernal noise. Neighbors and relatives continued to stream in, all with mouths creased, anxious, tearful.

  Yousif collapsed on the sofa under the half-moon-shaped window, his arms around his mother. She buried her face in his chest. He tried to console her, but needed consolation himself. His hot tears fell on her head; she shook with sobbing. He was surrounded by a sea of agonized faces, not one wearing make-up. Aunt Hilaneh and Abla, cousin Salman’s wife, tore the fronts of their dresses and beat their bosoms. The men had solemn faces; some even cried. Again and again Fatima howled. When Nurse Laila and her ramrod-straight husband arrived, the women went wild with dirges. Maha, Basim’s wife, entered the house, her arms flailing. Salman threw himself over his uncle’s body and cried like an old woman. Blow your trumpets, Cherubim! Yousif thought, as he glanced at winged angels embroidered on the draperies. Heavens, open your gates: one of God’s noblest is on his way.

  The dining room and one of the bedrooms were quickly transformed into sitting rooms. The furniture was removed and stacked elsewhere. Fouad Jubran noticed Basim standing in a corner on the eastern balcony with his left hand clutching his right shoulder. He had changed his blood-drenched shirt for one of Yousif’s. But it too was now blotted. Basim was withdrawn, listening to bullets cracking and resonating in the distance. The rest of the men sat tensely quiet.

  “My God, Basim,” Fouad Jubran said, walking toward him. “You need help.”

  Basim shook his head. “What I need is someone to drive me back to the hill.”

  Yousif, who had been inside, appeared at the door. “Dr. Afifi is on his way,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” Basim asked, turning around.

  “I just talked to him. He and Jihan will be here within ten minutes.”

  There was another burst of gunfire on a hill. Yousif was sure the Jews could not have returned to the same place. Basim perked his ears, then moved around the balcony, facing west. Others watched him and waited for some reaction.

  “Hanna,” Basim yelled.

  The driver of the pickup truck jumped to his feet.

  “Go back to the western hill,” Basim told him, “and see what’s going on. If things are quiet, bring the wounded for Dr. Afifi to take a look at them. We might as well let him make a night of it.”

  Several volunteered to go with Hanna, either to help him bring down the wounded or to stay as replacements. In the meantime, Dr. Jamil Safi’s villa shook with grief, as more and more mourners arrived.

  Basim was very quiet. “We need to double the number of men on every hill,” he finally said.

  Yousif moved closer to him. “But we beat them, didn’t we?” Yousif whispered.

  “Sure we did. But if we drove them away before they could pick up their casualties, they’d come back to get them. No good soldiers would leave their comrades behind.”

  Yousif gripped the railing, thinking. “Let’s hope they weren’t good soldiers,” he said.

  By noon, over a thousand people met at the doctor’s house to bid him a last farewell. The cortege passed slowly through the town. Yousif walked by his mother’s side, her arm entwined with his. He watched as men, including Amin and ustaz Hakim, took turns shouldering the coffin of their new martyr. Ardallah had better get used to such scenes, Yousif thought. The real war hadn’t even started. Wait until the dead are counted by the hundreds.

  The business district closed down for the funeral. The merchants who had their shops still open were seen rolling down their corrugated steel doors out of respect for the dead. The long column was headed by priests, ministers, Muslim religious leaders, the Arab District Commissioner, the mayor and the city council, and dignitaries of Ardallah and the neighboring towns and villages. Behind them was the open wooden casket held up high. Freckled twenty-year-old Mirwan, a distant cousin, walked behind them holding the cover. Following them were Basim and Yousif and their immediate family. The rest of the procession trailed behind.

  The ceremony at St. George Catholic Church was brief. Yousif regretted that the patriarch or at least the bishop wasn’t there for a proper send-off for his father. His father deserved the best. Father Mikhail gave what Yousif considered a short but dignified eulogy, praising the doctor’s many virtues and citing examples of his dedication to Ardallah. Even the doctor’s worst critics, he reminded them, must admit that the doctor had been a deeply religious man, a conscientious human being, and that the conflict that had erupted recently between him and the people of Ardallah was motivated by pure love.

  “It’s a reminder of the fallen state of mankind that this man of spirit, this beautiful soul, should have been considered too idealistic, too abstract for us ordinary
people. Why isn’t the world a fit place for such a good man? Because the world was capable of massacres like Deir Yasin.”

  Father Mikhail paused, lowered his voice and added, “The massacre of Deir Yasin gave rise to a cry that nearly tore him apart. His faith in the goodness of man was, to be sure, strained, shaken, shattered. But, it is a measure of his ultimate faith in humanity—that he did not succumb to utter despair. Till the very end he refused to believe that the grace of God would allow man to annihilate himself, but rather would lift him from the lower depths and would help him triumph and endure. Therefore, we must conclude that our departed brother, Dr. Jamil Safi, did not die a defeated man.”

  At the graveside, Yousif was ready to speak. He looked pale and distraught. He was afraid of breaking down and crying in public. To his surprise, the tears dried in his eyes. The crowd stood still, waiting for him to begin.

  Basim was standing to his left, his shoulder heavily bandaged. Jamal’s chin was trembling. Amin and all the teachers and classmates were there. His uncles and aunts were there—but not his grandparents and aunt Widad: they lived in Jerusalem and could not escape some raging battle in the Holy City. Ustaz Saadeh, was there; so was ustaz Rashad Hakim. So were hundreds of acquaintances and total strangers. So were Salwa and her parents. Yousif was sure Adel Farhat was there too, but he could not locate him. He wished Salwa could be at his side; he wished he had won her hand before his father’s death. His mother was at his right, but he was afraid his emotions would fail him if he looked at her. Their eyes must not meet.

  The hushed gathering, Yousif thought, bespoke of the town’s eulogy to his father—a song of death composed of every moment he had lived.

  He wanted to cry.

  He wanted to cry because his father had left it all. And because his father had not touched every stone, embraced every tree, and kissed every face farewell.

  He heard himself speaking. The words rolled out of his mouth. He listened to them as if they were uttered by someone else. After the opening sentences, he gained confidence. He was not choking with emotion; his voice was not failing him. The words were flowing as if he were reading a prepared speech. He glanced around; people were listening.

  It was no secret, he told them, that his father had loved Ardallah and its people. Deep in his heart, the doctor had known that the feeling was mutual.

  “With your help, his hospital will be built,” Yousif declared. “It will stand—not in his memory only, but in the memory of those who share in his dream. But built it will be. If not this year, next year. If not next year, the year after. We will work on it as soon as this war, which we neither provoked nor instigated, is over and Palestine is made safe. But now that the war is upon us, it must be won. We all wish we had not been dragged into this fight. And should someone, even at this late stage, dare to wage peace, he shall find us ready to embrace it. Should someone challenge us with generosity of spirit, he shall not go wanting. For nothing will please us—nothing will more exalt my father’s soul—than to see harmony return to Palestine, this holy, precious, tragic land.”

  The eyes of the near thousand mourners seemed to approve. His mother sniffled and dabbed her eyes. Salwa stared at him, her cheeks wet.

  Yousif stood still for a long moment, feeling abandoned like Jesus at Gethsemane. If Jesus could not drink the cup of pain and sorrow, how could he? Then Yousif knelt by the open casket and kissed his father’s forehead. It felt as hard and cold as a piece of marble. Its putrid taste lingered on his lips as several men converged on him and pulled him up.

  “Control yourself,” Salman told him, clutching his arm.

  “Ma’a es salameh,” Yousif said, gripped with emotion. “Go with peace.”

  As the grave diggers stepped forward to close the casket and lower it in the grave, the crowd began to disperse. Though tearful, Yousif was proud it was a befitting funeral. His father was honored in death. Many of his father’s adversaries, including the lame councilman Ayoub Salameh and the stuttering Ghanem Jadallah—even the pudgy postman, Costa—were among those in attendance. Yousif was impressed but not surprised. Death occupied a special place among the Arabs. Whenever calamity struck, they all shared each other’s sorrow and tended to forget and forgive.

  “A man who left behind a son like you did not die,” Jihan Afifi told Yousif. She hugged him and kissed him, but his eyes were on Salwa, who was standing at the other side of the grave. Finally, Salwa and her mother made their way to offer their condolences to him and his mother.

  “Yislem rasak,” Salwa told him, locking her eyes with his. “May you be safe.”

  “Oo rasik. And thank you for coming,” Yousif told her, shaking and squeezing her hand.

  Not only did she squeeze his back, but she patted it with her other hand.

  It was a poignant moment. He took her warmth as a good signal. Her feelings for him were intact. It was enough to lift his spirit.

  Salwa’s mother was equally genuine. Her father, on the other hand, paid his respect to his mother and the rest of the family—but not to him. Yousif was sure it was a deliberate slight. It bothered him, not because he was ignored, but because it foretold trouble.

  Yousif skipped school for the rest of the week. Their house was full of people who continued to drop in at all hours to pay their respects. Relatives kept Yousif and his mother company—from morning till almost midnight. His mother never cooked or was allowed near the kitchen. Fatima showed Maha and Abla where everything was and these two relatives prepared all the food. On the third day, Yousif’s grandparents and Aunt Widad and her family arrived from Jerusalem. Emotions erupted once again and the house trembled. After the situation had quieted down, the grief-stricken grandparents stayed with Yousif and his mother; Aunt Widad and Uncle Rasheed Ghattas and their three children stayed at Uncle Boulus’s house, across the street.

  When Yousif returned to school on Monday, wearing his father’s gold wristwatch and black sapphire ring, he was touched by his teachers’ and classmates’ deference to him. No trace of ill will was left toward him or his deceased father. They all shook his hands, offered their condolences, and stood still around him as though his sorrow were theirs. A new bond seemed to pull them together. Yousif checked the tears in his eyes, but was grateful.

  Despite the personal tragedy, Yousif never stopped thinking about politics. Now he was particularly encouraged by news that the Syrian military commander Fawzi al-Kawiqji and his thousand volunteers were engaging the enemy in battle near Beisan, in Galilee. Everybody else was encouraged too, except ustaz Hakim.

  This morning they were in the school’s basement, which had been converted into a simple gymnasium. The rectangular room had two ping pong tables, two punching bags, two dumbbells, and a set of gymnastic bars. All the students, including Yousif, wore blue shorts and white shirts and lined up against the walls, watching ustaz Hakim, who truly believed in the ideal of a fit mind in a fit body. Yousif felt guilty smiling at his teacher’s antics on the bars, yet he couldn’t help it. He marveled at seeing him swinging between the bars, flipping several times in mid-air to change directions, and then clutching the top bars without missing a beat. Yousif hated the comparison, but ustaz Hakim was as natural as a monkey on a tree.

  “Skirmishes are not enough,” ustaz Hakim said, his powerful hands gripping the top bars and his body swinging in the air. “It’s an all-out war, and we’re still twiddling our thumbs.”

  Yousif watched in awe as ustaz stood upside down between the bars, his biceps as big as oranges, then flipped backward with a flourish to land on his feet.

  At least the teacher was doing his share, Yousif thought. Ustaz Hakim had spent the night before guarding Ardallah on top of one of the hills. At daybreak he went home, took a shower, changed clothes, and came straight to school.

  Ustaz Hakim began sending the students up to perform for him, one at a time. Adnan was the best athlete in class and he got on first. Yousif could tell that Adnan intended to emulate his teacher, and Yousif f
eared for him. No one could be that accomplished without a natural talent and years of experience. For a while the students and teacher stopped talking politics and just watched. Adnan started out doing a few fancy tricks, the muscles of his biceps bulging—but not as big as the teacher’s. He was skillful, but too eager to be in the master’s class.

  “What’s the latest?” Amin asked the teacher.

  “Don’t you read the papers?” the ustaz chided him, his breathing even.

  “We like to hear your opinion,” Amin prodded.

  “The United Nations,” ustaz Hakim said, “is realizing that it has no actual power to enforce the partition. Now it’s trying at Lake Success, in New York, to stop the fighting and create a trusteeship. We Arabs, or rather the heads of states, are meeting at Aley, Lebanon, and trying to stem the tide.”

  “And agreeing not to agree,” said Yousif, repeating a popular sarcasm.

  “Exactly,” the ustaz said, mopping his face with a towel. “In the meantime, ships at Haifa and Jaffa harbors are still unloading thousands of Jewish immigrants and tons of ammunition.”

  Some of the students swore under their breath; others gathered around the teacher. Yousif folded his arms, wishing he could withdraw from the whole human race. A world that killed his father wasn’t fit to live in. He glanced at his father’s gold watch and rubbed his sapphire ring as though evoking him to reappear.

  “King Abdullah seems to be our only hope,” ustaz Hakim said. “His Arab Legion is the best trained and best equipped. But will he commit it seriously in total battle? An Englishman, Glubb Pasha, is commanding his army and Britain is financing his kingdom. Britain isn’t about to let him have a free hand and deal the Zionists a blow. After all it was Balfour, another Englishman, who promised the Zionists a national home in Palestine.”

  Yousif and his classmates were all ears.

  “Even if Britain permits the defeat of the Zionists,” ustaz Hakim went on calmly, “will the United States stand idly by? This is an election year. Truman wants to live four more years at the White House.”